Hem 2 // Animatic No audio

Comments

When she leaves the house at the beginning, I think it would be good to see a POV shot as if from the front door of the house, showing her walking towards the woodland, so we know where she's going. I get the impression always from your world that she's walking through snow and that this is a white, silent world? If so, I think you could likewise do a bit more shot-wise when she's walking through the trees - so instead of the camera only staying on her in mid shot as she walks though the woods, consider breaking this sequence up via wipe cuts - so you use the parallax of trees to transition between a wider range of shots, so first we see her walking left to right in an establishing shot, with trees in the foreground, mid-ground and background - so we get a sense of her being 'deep' in the woods; then, you use the passing of a foreground tree to 'wipe' on a closer-shot of your character walking through the snow, and then you repeat this to take us to a closer shot - so we go from getting a sense of how alone she is in the big wide wood, but then the camera invites us back to identify with her more personally. As your story takes place in the woods, where you've got all those nice verticals, thinking about 'wipe cuts' as a means of compressing time/distance and moving things a long quickly might be something you want to think about more: two examples of use of wipe cuts - the most famous arguably as seen in Jaws, and then how CAA grad Emily Clarkson used it to good effect in Morrigan:

You're still missing a section where we see the girl arrive at the floating house in her balloon - this is important, because it's got to make us feel elated - as if the prize has been won; it should be a bit wondrous and magical, because if we don't get a sense of this, then we can't feel your character's realisation of the cost of her decision when she notices that she's wrecked her original environment.

In terms of the montage of inventions - right now, it's not clear if she's trying things out and having them fail and going back to the drawing board, or if she's just working to the one invention? It feels to me, as if you have to better communicate her growing frustration/urgency - one way of doing this is showing her failing and becoming more and more obsessive, which accounts for her not thinking about what she's doing to her home. I also think it would be useful if we were shown the floating house again - or rather we're shown her returning to the rope - looking up in frustration etc to remind us of what all her activity is about. It occurred to me - in visual storytelling terms, that you could use the snow to convey some of this back and forth without getting into lots more 'walking' - you could show how her footprints in the snow are becoming more and more erratic, going back and forth, all around the house, in and out of the woods - a kind of visual means of showing us that she's churning everything up and going 'around in circles' - I can see it working as a kind of visual pattern or motif that you can cut to in between her various actions to show the audience that she's going in and out of the woods. It occurred to me to that maybe you could include another motif - snowdrops - which when we first see her house and the woodland, there are all those delicate perfect flowers, which, as the film progresses, we see them trampled on and ignored, and this could be another way of telling us that she's lost touch with the value and richness of her home in her quest for her goal. Again - the use of the Angie Lewin style flowers could be an 'non-animated/non-walkcycle' way of giving us more thematic information. I think broadly I'm suggesting that you make her environment work harder for you in terms of visual storytelling.